Friday, June 26, 2015

Putin Now Seeking to Intimidate Journalists into Not Covering His Opponents

Paul
Goble

Staunton, June 26 – In the age of
the Internet, it isn’t enough for an authoritarian ruler to control what
appears in newspapers and on television. If he really wants to isolate his
opponents, he must try to intimidate journalists into not covering those the
leader doesn’t like lest they post their reports online and give aid, comfort
and especially exposure to his opponents.

That is a line Vladimir Putin has now
crossed in the case of Grigory Pasko, an independent journalist who has been
researching the case of Igor Bitkov, a Russian businessman now being detained
in Guatemala at Moscow’s insistence because he apparently crossed Putin
personally or one of Putin’s entourage.

The Bitkov case is such an egregious
example of the combination of corruption and official overreaching at the top
of the Russian political system that not surprisingly it has attracted the
attention of journalists and rights activists both in the Russian Federation
and the West.

That attention, from people whose
stories Putin can block from appearing in Russian-government controlled media
but cannot be equally successful in preventing such reports from appearing
online or in publications now beyond the reach of the Kremlin, has prompted the
Kremlin to take steps to keep even independent journalists from covering
stories like this one.

On Wednesday, Pasko writes on Ekho
Moskvy today, he was attempting to visit a source on the Bitkov case in Neman,
a city in Kaliningrad oblast near the border of the Russian Federation.He was stopped by about 15 armed men,
clearly FSB officers and told he was in a border zone without the necessary
authorization (echo.msk.ru/blog/bordo07/1573340-echo/).

But it quickly became obvious that they
were acting not because he had violated any rule but rather because in the
words of one, they had received “orders” to stop him from doing the interview
and had come up with a charge that they likely couldn’t substantiate to try to
achieve that end.

Pasko says he was held for three hours in
what he described as a kind of “time machine” that returned him back to the
Soviet era, when this kind of thing happened often enough to any journalist who
tried to investigate that which the communists did not want investigated. Now,
Putin is restoring this approach, using government assets to keep certain
things under wraps.